A blog about tabletop hobby and or strategy games, with a side order of electronic turn based goodness here and there. Now with tons of retro gaming content both electronic and tabletop. Also with 20% more self loathing douchebaggery!

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Mechwarrior Online Second June Patch. Aka: "zzz"

This is a shorter update this time around so I can also hit my four posts a month minimum (even though I have posted enough content this year already to take a month or two off) and not have to do some massive mega MWO update later where I forget half of what changed. Part of this MWO series is showing the evolution of a game. Kind of hard to do when you forget lots of what changed.

(Also I am kind of slacking off on posting this month. Birthday, busy, self loathing, depression. Need to get a post in while I am inspired enough to do so.)

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The major update this time around is a new mech, the Quickdraw. Its a 60 ton mech that is ok but nothing special. Better than the previous new mech though. (The Blackjack. Upcoming mechs include the Orion, Flea, and Victor.)

I cannot recall ever posting a screencap of the actual patch notes before so here is this one's. It is skipping the new mech info and showing what they did to rebalance things. Damage tweaks, programming tweaks to try to fix weapons (SRMs are currently semi useless right now.), and other sorts of changes and modifications. Not counting later changes such as a hot patch they did a few days later that improved SRMs by a small amount.

Our new mech. I didn't buy one. I have the Catapult for my Heavy chassis needs even if it's headbox is currently too large and is thus a mostly useless mech people just headcap in a couple sniper shots, especially right now where half the community or more mostly sit around and snipe with PPC and Gauss guns at long range.

Its an ok redesign from the original tabletop source but it still isn't exactly amazing like the Catapult and Atlas redesigns were.

Some level graphics changes to make things nicer and sometimes adding in new bits of terrain so the maps play better.

Though there are still issues in many maps that need fixing.

And many bits of strangeness such as what is known as "Mecha Shiva" where one mech is on top of another. In this case a friendly is under an enemy who I mostly demolished. There is some collision damage in the game but the ramming and knock over effects from the closed beta periods is basically gone which makes for some odd situations.

Overall this was a mostly forgettable patch. One new mech and more tweaks. (Plus you can see my Cheevo Bullet hanging on the side of my cockpit. Upper right. It even wobbles about as I move!)

This game REALLY has a lot of work to do to be something I can wholeheartedly recommend to people who aren't Battletech fans or who have a large community to play with live voice chat communications.